'64 and Counting: Scene's Sports Blog

WKNR Has Discovered YouTube, Kenny Roda Uses It to Whine

The technophobes over at WKNR have launched a YouTube page, obviously having not heeded the age-old saying about faces for radio, or something like that. Having discovered Twitter only recently, it was mildly surprising to see them leap onto the YouTube bandwagon so soon, but here we are.

While the @ESPNCleveland Twitter account is mainly for regurgitating widely-known "news breaks" and posting photos of WKNR staff looking like creeps next to ladies of questionable attractiveness, that doesn't seem to be the tact they're taking so far with the YouTube page.

One of the three videos available so far is of Kenny Roda standing in front of some Buckeye posters and giving a whiny monologue. I don't mind Kenny for the most part. He's good on basketball and football and not so good on baseball. (Incidentally, Kenny's promise to talk more soccer and World Cup now that the Indians have pissed him off so much isn't comforting at all. If there's anything the world needs less than Kenny talking baseball, it's Kenny talking soccer.) My only other problem is that he's a bit fuzzy on math. (He said he had 736 Twitter followers the other day and only needed about 335 more to reach 1000. I'm sure someone corrected his math after I turned the station off.)

Here, Kenny just whines that LeBron James chose Larry King over any local media for his first interview since the playoffs ended. The segment even has a title: The Barbershop, which unfortunately means that Top Men plan on making it something of a recurring feature. Lord help us.

(If you made it more than 30 seconds into that video, you deserve a pat on the back.)

So welcome Kenny Roda to the world of the internet, where approximately 756,242 people set up cameras and tape themselves giving a rant. This particular video is really no different in production quality or actual quality than the one embedded below from some guy named Brandon. I used to wait tables with Brandon at a Lebanese restaurant back in the day. Good times. Here's Brandon laying down some logic about Palestine and Israel in front of his aquarium. Enjoy.

I really shouldn't care this much, but as the only legitimate all-sports station on the Cleveland airwaves, WKNR actually has the potential to do some quality coverage. It should involve all sorts of media and social media, but not if they continue to use them in only the most unimaginative, regrettable, and utterly insufferable ways.

I won't even start on the "blogs" they run over there. Just not worth the time or effort. I'm sure they do well in traffic numbers, listener numbers, ad revenue, and whatever other sort of metrics they're measuring their success by, but by and large, everything except the product on the radio could be classified as simply a clusterfuck of embarrassment.